Jacob Fortinsky and the price of being right

Jacob Fortinsky had already taken the LSAT. Law school was a plausible next step; so was a PhD. At Harvard, he studied the kinds of questions that can occupy a seminar for an afternoon and a person for a lifetime: philosophy, politics, economics. A career spent arguing about how institutions should work seemed entirely reasonable. Then he encountered an institution that irritated him enough to build a replacement.

The institution was the sportsbook. Fortinsky says he was making money betting on sports when operators began limiting what he could wager. Success, in this arrangement, could make you a less welcome customer. For someone drawn to markets because they rewarded a good judgment, that was an awkward discovery. The prize for getting the answer right appeared to include being asked to stop answering.

He began Novig in March 2021, while still an undergraduate. Five years later, he is its co-founder and CEO, overseeing a sports prediction-market business that has changed operating models more than once. The enduring question is his original one: could a place for trading sports outcomes welcome the people who were good at it? The answer has required considerably more than a clever app.

Before the pitch deck, the debate club

Fortinsky’s hometown is Larchmont, New York. Long before venture investors entered the picture, he and Aaron Miller were school friends, basketball teammates and political debaters. Miller remembers starting a debate club together and arguing enthusiastically about subjects they did not yet understand particularly well. An early education in public life, then, with the customary surplus of confidence.

That friendship has lasted into their professional lives. Miller became an investor at Will Ventures; Fortinsky became a founder in an industry Miller follows. Their conversation in 2026 had the comfortable specificity of people with a shared past. It also put a useful wrinkle in the founder biography: the adolescent interest had been politics. Sports markets were a later destination.

Fortinsky’s public record extends beyond business announcements. He wrote political commentary for The Times of Israel, including a 2017 essay on the contemporary uses of the Purim story. His Harvard activities included the Crimson editorial board and the Institute of Politics. Today, the official Novig biography places regulatory engagement alongside product development, operations and capital formation in his responsibilities. The old interest in institutions has acquired a rather practical job description.

A philosopher meets a physicist over cards

At Harvard, Fortinsky became friends with Kelechi Ukah. Poker was among their shared interests. Ukah’s academic territory was physics and mathematics; his experience included CERN and quantitative trading at Jane Street. Fortinsky brought work in legislative research, investment banking and financial trading. Their partnership joined two different ways of examining the same problem: the rules governing a market and the machinery that makes it run.

Ukah joined the venture in autumn 2021. The pair did not arrive with a lifelong commitment to founding a gambling company. Fortinsky has described the idea as something they felt they would regret leaving alone. That distinction matters to the story. The frustration came before the company; the company offered somewhere to put it.

He had been interested in trading well before graduation. He says he started with stocks at thirteen and later explored foreign exchange and options. His first prediction-market trade concerned Brexit, shortly after high school. The appeal was partly intellectual: a market could gather competing judgments and give them a price. A lively disagreement suddenly had a number attached to it.

At a conventional sportsbook, the operator sets the offered odds and takes the other side of the wager. An exchange instead provides a venue where opposing orders can meet. Fortinsky wanted sports bettors to have that kind of marketplace. It is an appealing proposition for somebody who believes he has spotted a mistake in the price. It is also a proposition that becomes useful only when somebody else is there to trade.

Two years to let the first users in

Novig joined Y Combinator’s summer 2022 batch. By the following summer, Fortinsky was announcing an early tournament to people on the waitlist. His description began with the two years of work it had taken to get that far. In a founder’s retelling, the starting date and the funding date can sit politely next to each other. Product development fills the less photogenic space between them.

A pre-launch beta tournament gave the team something more concrete than an investor’s opinion. Novig reported 200 participants, 15,500 orders and 1,290 markets over two weeks. Those figures describe a test, rather than a mature business. They also show why exchanges have to be built and observed: the product is partly the software and partly the behavior of the people using it.

In August 2023, Novig announced a $6.4 million seed round. Its backers included Lux Capital and investors associated with Silicon Valley, with Joe Montana among the recognizable names. Fortinsky discussed his decision to seek capital outside the betting industry. He was asking technology investors to take an interest in an industry’s plumbing, rather than simply adding another sign above the same familiar shop.

The company’s early language emphasized commission-free trading. The name itself points to the vig, the bookmaker’s margin that Fortinsky wanted to remove. A name can make an argument in five letters. Delivering that argument requires pricing, counterparties, software and permission to operate. The final item would prove especially stubborn.

Colorado supplied an inconvenient answer

Novig launched its regulated Colorado offering at the beginning of 2024. Fortinsky later described a mismatch between the product he wanted and the product the regulatory setting allowed. Peer-to-peer functionality was constrained; the company had to operate more like a traditional sportsbook. A business designed to change the structure of betting had found itself working inside the structure it hoped to change.

The team stopped that operation and pursued a sweepstakes product, rolling it out in September 2024. That framework used virtual currencies and widened the company’s reach. It gave the founders another chance to put the exchange experience in front of users. Changing the route was expensive and difficult, but it preserved the destination.

Fortinsky’s later interviews describe a period when money was running short and some investors suggested winding down. His concise advice to other New York founders was “Stay alive.” It is less decorative than most startup wisdom. It also captures the immediate task: keep enough time on the clock to find out whether the product can work under a different set of rules.

By August 2025, Novig had raised an $18 million Series A led by Forerunner. The company reported that more than ninety percent of trades were entirely peer-to-peer. For Fortinsky, that figure spoke directly to the original ambition. Users were meeting one another in a market. The long detour had produced evidence that the behavior he wanted was possible.

“Stay alive.”Jacob Fortinsky, on advice to founders

A new rulebook, with the same obsession

February 2026 brought a $75 million Series B led by Pantera Capital, at a reported $500 million post-money valuation. Novig’s disclosed funding had passed $105 million. The money arrived while the company was seeking federal exchange status. Fortinsky was still pitching a sports-specific product, now with a plan to move beyond the sweepstakes framework.

In June, Ludlow Exchange, the entity behind Novig’s exchange, received designation from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The new prediction-market offering launched on August 4. Federal designation gave the company a different regulatory foundation, although disputes with states continued. The launch was another chapter in the same negotiation between a product idea and the institutions surrounding it.

Novig reported more than $125 million in notional trading volume during the first week. Volume measures activity through the market; it is a different number from revenue, company value or customer profit. Keeping those distinctions clear is part of understanding Fortinsky’s achievement. He had helped bring a sports exchange to market, and people were trading on it.

The current terms also deserve their own date. By October 2026, Novig described pregame straight trades and maker fills as fee-free, while live trades, futures and parlays could carry taker fees. Availability excluded Arizona, Michigan and Nevada. The early commission-free pitch is part of the origin story; the present product has more specific terms.

Fortinsky has also argued that the exchange should bear responsibility for how its markets operate. Novig adopted a trading framework in its exchange rulebook in August and maintains a minimum age of twenty-one. His statement put the obligation succinctly: “Trust is the foundation of every market.” A founder who began by objecting to a platform’s incentives now has incentives of his own to defend.

The seminar gets a celebrity guest

In September, Novig introduced its first national brand campaign with Sydney Sweeney as a strategic partner and equity holder. The message was a tight expression of the company’s choice of territory: sports. Fortinsky said she had approached the business, and her involvement extended to the campaign’s creative direction. A company concerned with order matching was learning to compete for attention.

The advertisement attracted criticism from some women athletes as well as considerable publicity. Fortinsky defended it and said it was meant to explain the platform rather than represent women’s sport. By October, he was sharing company figures showing trading volume up nearly ninety-four percent around the campaign launch. The comparison also encompassed the start of the NFL season. Attention and activity had risen together; the numbers did not isolate what the advertisement alone had caused.

Late-September reports attached a potential $2 billion valuation to new financing. Accounts differed over whether the round was complete or still being negotiated. For a profile of Fortinsky, the useful fact is the scale of investor interest, rather than a premature declaration about a closed deal. It marks a considerable change from the period when survival itself had been the assignment.

A long game, occasionally interrupted by basketball

Fortinsky’s ambitions extend to a global sports trading venue and a company built to endure. In conversation, he has discussed an eventual trillion dollars in trading volume. That is a goal, rather than a current result. It asks the reader to picture the business over years, while the history so far suggests how much can change between one launch and the next.

There are smaller pleasures in the picture, too. He named skiing in Vermont as a favorite winter escape and said the team had held a retreat there. His conversation with Miller returned to basketball. A friendship that once involved school debates still has room for a game. These details offer some welcome scale beside the fundraising numbers.

Fortinsky’s story began with a complaint about the reward for being right. Running Novig has demanded another skill: deciding which assumptions to keep when reality objects. He has retained the exchange idea while changing the way the company reaches its users. The would-be lawyer is still spending his days among rules, arguments and competing judgments. He has simply given them somewhere to trade.